Books

THE SAME TERRIBLE STORM (stories)

“The Same Terrible Storm
introduces us to a fierce and lyrical writer who, in his depiction of
contemporary Appalachian life, is equal parts uncompromising and
compassionate, and able to eerily channel a wide spectrum of distinctive
voices—coal miners, musicians, pill poppers, snake handlers, writers,
marijuana farmers, brutal men and complicated women, knowing children
and dangerous elders—all of them filled with yearning, all of them
inextricably bound to their time and place. An extraordinary debut
collection.” — K. L. Cook, author of Love Songs for the Quarantined and Last Call

“Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition
of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short
story writer and the poet, saying, “the short story…is the most
demanding form after poetry.” A story like “The Son of a Man” in The Same Terrible Storm isn’t so much a story as it is prose poetry. Compton doesn’t write paragraphs, but rather indented stanzas.”—David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go

“This is a brilliant book by Sheldon Lee Compton, one of our finest short story writers in the independent publishing world.”—Robert Vaughan, author of Microtones and Rift

“Yes, yes, yes, here’s a book that
restores my faith that literary fiction can be more than just the
repurposing of long exhausted themes, more than another trope for a
previously disenfranchised group, and more than a game of
sentence-making mumblety-peg played by a narrow swath of writers. You
could pick up hundreds of books and not find anything that resembles the
way these words are assembled. Too much of literary fiction is simply a
different story told with the same style of language. Sometimes it
seems only the names of the characters have changed. Not so with Where Alligators Sleep.” —Steven J. McDermott, author of Winter of Different Directions and Editor of Storyglossia

“I thought I knew flash fiction. I felt
pretty comfortable with its range and scope, its genre boundaries and
limitations. And then I read Sheldon Lee Compton’s Where Alligators Sleep.
And everything I thought I knew and loved about flash fiction went
sailing out the front door, hit the curb and was run over by a pickup
truck. This is the sort of collection that reaches deep into your chest,
grabs hold of your heart and twists. It is raw, visceral, daring, risky
and, at the end of the day, rock-solid writing. I have never so
whole-heartedly recommended a collection of flash fiction.” —Steph Post, author of A Tree Born Crooked

“Pieces
of flash and fiction that linger in your brain, but then as a whole
become something more, a picture of what it means to be a man, full of
violence, work, death, relationships, children, and what it means to be
alive and part of the world.” —Ben Tanzer, author of Be Cool

“Sheldon Lee
Compton is one of the new young breed of Kentucky writers–talented,
fearless, and strong–bringing us word from the hills. —Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight

“Sheldon Lee
Compton is a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come
down the pike since Larry Brown, and Brown Bottle is his best work yet.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time

“Brown Bottle,
by Sheldon Lee Compton, is a bottleneck blues of a novel, played at
midnight, harsh, unsparing, and real as hell. Brown Bottle the man is
also someone you won’t forget. His story has emotional and moral weight.
You won’t read a better novel this year.” —Rusty Barnes, author of Ridgerunner

“Poetic, strange, mythic, and true, this work by Sheldon Lee Compton will take your breath away. It’s life and death and love and loss. It’s survival and transformation. The artistry is reminiscent of Matt Bell, but it’s Compton’s inimitable voice that shines through each and every page of this novella. Highly recommended.”–Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It

“Wild as a charging boar and tender as a raindrop, Sheldon Lee Compton’s Alice and the Wendigo is a surreal sleepwalk through a world in which love is a storm and death is a question. It will wake you with a jolt.”– Meredith Alling, author of Sing the Song
“Held in a cryptic in-between place fraught with many Alices, new bodies that struggle to know hunger and monsters that once were men, Compton’s Alice and the Wendigo boldly unfurls itself. With every sentence a poem and its vibrant imagery, Compton completely captures.”

Volume 4 of Dog On A Chain Press's Lantern Lit. series, Vol. 4 features modern and aesthetic underground poetics from the Appalachian hillside. Sheldon Lee Compton appears with Dog On A Chain Press and in the Lantern Lit series for the first time with his contribution Podunk Lore.William Graham's second offering for the series is followed up by Mat Gould's third title in the series.

"Compton's section of Lantern Lit Vol. 4 offers us the redemption of hope for a post-apocalyptic future...Yet again, the female presence represents delicacy and impermanence, “. . . a body movable in a catch of wind.” Still, the chance to recover from the destruction of the beauty of creation, the hope to be found amidst the doom, is shown to be found in human interaction." - Red Fez